Limes: Lesson Learned

Last year our new-ish lime tree didn’t produce more than a few pieces of fruit so I was really very excited to see the tree loaded with fruit this year… but alas, instead of making limeade and fresh salsa with our home grown limes we learned a hard lesson instead. Turns out that you are supposed to harvest limes BEFORE they are ripe, while they are yet green, before they turn bright yellow and look just like little lemons. I did not know.

These past few weeks I’ve been utterly distracted from home and garden chores, focusing instead on caring for my ailing mother and maintaining my sanity as thing after thing went awry… so I only noticed the limes this week at all because they had turned yellow. Super yellow. Gorgeous yellow! I thought to myself, “I did plant a lime tree there, didn’t I?” and then I googled. Yeah- limes do in fact turn yellow, and yellow limes are no-good limes. Turns out they get hard and taste bad once they fully ripen. And so this week I will be picking a lot of limes.. and throwing them in the green bin. Bummer.

Lesson learned! I hope, dear friends, that you can learn from my many mistakes. I know I’m always learning- often the hard way.

Today’s Project: Today I replaced some very old and unattractive houseplants with pretty, young, shiny houseplants. Why do I feel so guilty?